Introduce yourself and state why you are writing this journal. Include your name, country of origin, and occupation.
Dear Journal,

PUSH AND PULL FACTORS

Record your reasons for leaving your homeland.
Dear Journal,

IMMIGRATION AND URBANIZATION: PHOTO JOURNAL

INFORMATION FROM PICTURE

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JOURNAL

JOURNEY ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

Record your thoughts and feelings about the voyage to America.
Dear Journal,

ARRIVAL IN AMERICA

Describe your thoughts and feelings upon arriving at Ellis Island. What was it like to be processed through Ellis Island?
Dear Journal,

IMMIGRATION AND URBANIZATION: PHOTO JOURNAL

INFORMATION FROM PICTURE

INFORMATION FROM DOCUMENTS

JOURNAL

ETHNIC NEIGHBORHOODS

Record your thoughts and feelings about arriving in the place where you intend to settle.
Dear Journal,

LIVING CONDITIONS

Tell where you settled and describe your living conditions here.
Dear Journal,

IMMIGRATION AND URBANIZATION: PHOTO JOURNAL

INFORMATION FROM PICTURE

INFORMATION FROM DOCUMENTS

JOURNAL

WORKING CONDITIONS

Describe the working conditions you encountered.
Dear Journal,

TREATMENT OF IMMIGRANTS

Describe native-born Americans’ reaction to you.
Dear Journal,

IMMIGRATION AND URBANIZATION: PHOTO JOURNAL

INFORMATION FROM PICTURE

INFORMATION FROM DOCUMENTS

JOURNAL

CHANGES IN CITY

Describe your impressions of living a city.
Dear Journal,

BOSS & MACHINE POLITICS

Explain the positives and negatives of political machines in the city.
Dear Journal,

IMMIGRATION AND URBANIZATION: PHOTO JOURNAL

INFORMATION FROM PICTURE

INFORMATION FROM DOCUMENTS

JOURNAL

REFORM MOVEMENTS

Describe how you feel about some of the reformers and their work.
Dear Journal,

GREAT MIGRATIONGROWTH OF IMMIGRATIONAmerica’s population would increase more than three times during the last half of the 19th century. A large portion of this increase was due to the large number of immigrants coming to America. From 1880 to 1921, record setting 23 million immigrants arrived on America’s shores in what one scholar called “the largest mass movement in human history.” At that time, the United States had no quotas, or limits, on how many immigrants from a particular country could enter the U.S. Nor did it require immigrants to have a passport or special entrance papers. America’s door was open to the world, and the world came in droves.
OLD V. NEW IMMIGRANTS“Old” Immigrants:

Description given to immigrants who came prior to 1880

Mostly from Northern and Western Europe: Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia

The majority of immigrants came to the United States for economic reasons. In the late 1800s, the agriculturally based economies of many European towns and villages declined as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Farmers who had not mechanized their operations found themselves unable to compete with those who had. Farmers that did mechanize often laid off local farm laborers, as their jobs could be performed more cheaply and easily by machines. In addition, local craftspeople often could not compete with city factories, who produced goods cheaply, rapidly, and in mass quantity. Furthermore, wealthy landowners either maintained complete control over farmlands or charged peasant farmers extraordinarily high fees to rent the land. Many farming families lived on tiny plots of lands that barely provided the foodstuffs they needed to survive.

One author writing about eastern European farm laborers commented, “Their standard way of life was one of slow starvation. They lived in unhygienic, overcrowded slums, on an average yearly income of hardly more than a hundred dollars…. Children were underfed…97 percent of the farm servants lived in buildings which also housed stables. Disease was rampant…[and] infant mortality was very high.”
POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN EASTERN EUROPE

Other European immigrants, particularly eastern European Jews, left their homes to escape political and religious persecution. Many Jews lived in a Russian-controlled region known as the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Most Jews could not move “beyond the Pale” and had been stripped of their legal rights. For example, Russian law forbade Jews from owning and renting land, and almost universally excluded them from attending secondary schools and universities. In addition, Russian laws restricted the kinds of occupations in which Jews could engage. As a result many Jewish families lived in poverty. Plus, after 1881, the government supported violent mob attacks against Jews know as pogroms. During pogroms, Jews were beaten, murdered, raped, and had their homes looted or destroyed.

One Jewish immigrant, recalling his treatment in Russia, stated, “Am I not despised? Am I not urged to leave?...Do I not rise daily with the fear lest the hungry mob attack me?”
THE LURE OF LIFE IN AMERICA

In addition to the factors pushing immigrants to leave their homelands, other factors pulled them toward the United States. Positive reasons for choosing to emigrate to the United States included this country’s reputation for political and religious freedom and the economic opportunities afforded by the settling of the Great Plains and the abundance of industrial jobs in the U.S. cities. In addition, some American businesses and factories sent representatives overseas in search of available, cheap labor. Often the information was inaccurate or outdated, such as pamphlets advertising cheap land that was actually no longer available in the American West.

One Lithuanian immigrant recalled, “That was the time, you see, when America was known to foreigners as the land where you’d get rich. There’s gold on the sidewalk—all you have to do is pick it up.”
LEAVING THE HOMELAND

Immigrants faced many hardships as they began their journey to the United States. Many families used all their savings to pay for the trip, including steamship fare, which could run from $65 to $100 per ticket. Others spent large sums of money bribing local officials to issue them exit papers or passports so they could leave the country. Many immigrants lived far away from the port cities from which the steamships embarked for the U.S., in particular, many Italian and Slavic immigrants hat to travel hundred of miles by train or foot to reach the coastal regions.

One Czechoslovakian immigrant remembered, “Me and my brother-in-law, we start. We start walking—from Hungarian country to Hamburg, Germany—one month. We walk till we got tired, sit down a little bit, and walk again. It’s a long way.”

JOURNEY ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

STEAMSHIP ACCOMODATIONS

The steamship on which they traveled typically held from 1,200 to over 2,000 people and was their home from 8 to 14 days. Most immigrants could not afford first or second class accommodations, instead they traveled in the ship’s steerage compartments, which were located under the ship’s deck at the front and the back of the boat. The compartments typically had no windows, little ventilation, and were 6 to 8 feet high. Every where the steerage passengers looked, the ship’s steel walls surrounded them, and rows upon rows of metal bunks filled each compartment. At the foot of the bunks were narrow tables at which passengers usually ate their meals. Toilet facilities varied, from one toilet for every 47 passengers to one toilet for every 1,000 passengers. Men and women had separate living areas, although sometimes the only thing separating them was a blanket strung across the compartment.

One Russian immigrant described his compartment as having “three tiers of cubicles for bunks…with just enough room in the center to move about before climbing in and out of our beds.”
LIVING CONDITIONS IN STEERAGE

The living conditions in steerage were uncomfortable at best, inhumane at worst. Ships often provided steerage passengers with a bare minimum of food, so most people brought on board whatever food they could. Passengers slept on straw-stuffed mattresses—sometimes called “donkeys breakfasts”—which ship staff threw overboard at the end of the voyage. Steerage passengers spent most of their voyage deprived of sky, sunlight, and fresh air, and the smell was often unbearable. Some ships had steerage decks, but bad weather often forced immigrants to return to their quarters. In addition, passengers were crammed against one another, and contagious diseases such as smallpox and typhoid spread quickly. By the end of the voyage, immigrants who had survived the journey were as overjoyed to leave steerage as they were to catch a first glimpse of their new home, America.

One Lithuanian woman recalled, “All you got on th boat was water, boiled water….Sometimes they gave ou a watery soup,more like a mud puddle than soup.”
An agent from the U.S. Immigration Commission noted, “During the 12 days in the steerage I lived in…surroundings that offended every sense. Only the fresh breeze from the sea overcame the sickening odors. Everything was dirty, sticky, and disagreeable to the touch.”

ARRIVAL IN AMERICA

ARRIVING

From 1892 to the early 1920s, approximately 75 percent of all immigrants entered the United States through the immigration processing center at Ellis Island, located in New York Harbor. Immigrant passengers were often seized with a feverish excitement as their steamship neared New York. The towering skyscrapers of New York City rose in the northeast, and to the west, the most majestic sight of all: Liberty Island and its world-famous monument, the Statue of Liberty. For many immigrants, their first glimpse of Lady Liberty would be a moment they would remember all of their lives. Beyond the Statue of Liberty lay Ellis Island—or , as some immigrants referred to it, the Island of Tears—and formidable, red brick building where most immigrants would be inspected, questioned, and with any luck, cleared for entrance into the United States.

One woman recalled, “The first time I saw the Statue of Liberty, all the people were rushing to the side of the boat. ‘Look at her, look at her,’ and in all kind of tongues. ‘There she is, there she is,’ like it was somebody who was greeting them.”
MEDICAL INSPECTIONS

While all new immigrants faced some kind of U.S. inspection, first and second class passengers did not have to endure the lengthy inspection process that awaited the steerage passengers on Ellis Island. When a ship arrived in the harbor, a quarantine inspector boarded and checked that none of the passengers had highly contagious or life-threatening diseases, such as cholera, the plague, and typhoid. Next, the higher class passengers were briefly questioned and examined by U.S. immigrant inspectors, after which the ship docked at one of the many piers that ran along the west side of New York City. The first and second class passengers then disembarked; for them, the journey was over. The steerage class passengers, however, boarded flat-bottomed barges or tugboats that would take them to Ellis Island, where they would undergo a rigorous inspection process.

Upon arriving at Ellis Island, the new immigrants disembarked from the crowded boats onto the island’s ferry docks. Immigration officials gave each person a tag to pin onto their outer clothes. The tag identified each person by a number that corresponded to a number assigned to them by the steamship on which they traveled. Interpreters shouted out the numbers in different languages—such as Hungarian, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish—to arrange the immigrants into groups of 30 for processing. While the U.S. essentially had an “open door” policy toward admitting immigrants into the country, government officials sought to weed out immigrants whom they believed would require public assistance, such as mentally ill and the sick. Many immigrants found the medical examinations the most traumatic part of the inspection process. Physicians closely examined the immigrants for disease and any perceived defects. They often asked immigrants to unbutton or remove items of clothing that might conceal physical problems.
LEGAL INSPECTIONS

After undergoing the medical examination, immigrants faced a final legal inspection in the Registry Hall. The hall was huge—200 feet long, 100 feet wide, and 56 feet tall—and could hold as many as 5,000 people. For many immigrants, the most striking feature of the Registry Hall was its formidable network of iron railings, designed to keep the immigrants in orderly lines as they waited to be questioned. Immigrants typically waited two to three hours to be questioned, although occasionally the wait was as long as a day. The legal inspection was essentially the same for each immigrant, and lasted approximately two to three minutes. First, a registry clerk called out the name of the immigrant when it was her turn to be questioned. Assisted by a language interpreter, the inspector asked the immigrant 32 questions to determine whether she, as one author explained, “was coming to this country for a legitimate reason, had a proper moral character, and was unlikely to become a ward of the state, or a violent revolutionary.” Many inspectors recorded immigrants’ names incorrectly. One eastern European immigrant recalled, “My father’s surname was Kapelovich….the immigration people heard the name and spelled it Kaplowitz on our papers.”

ETHNIC NEIGHBORHOODS

“ETHNIC ENCLAVES”

After arriving in the United States, about two thirds of immigrants settled in urban centers, such as New York City, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. By 1920, 75 percent of foreign-born U.S. residents lived in cities. Many immigrants initially stayed with friends or relatives, a majority of whom lived in close knit ethnic neighborhoods, or enclaves, in America’s cities. These enclaves provided new immigrants with a sense of community and security, as the immigrants were surrounded by the familiar customs, food, language, and institutions of their homeland. Consequently, many new immigrants settled in the enclaves permanently. Most enclaves were crowded, and their streets teemed with local residents, peddlers, and merchants, and horse and carriages. The enclaves provided immigrants with many of the trappings of their country of origin: newspapers in their native language, grocery stores with familiar foods, people who wore the garb of their homeland, and churches whose congregants hailed primarily from their ethnic group. Immigrants often established businesses that catered to the needs of their compatriots, thereby strengthening their economic and social ties to the community.
One Polish immigrant recalled, “There were Irish neighborhoods, German, Italian, and Chinese ones nearby also, but we tended to stay in our own area.”
One eastern European immigrant observing a Jewish enclave in New York City commented, “It is one of the most densely populated spots on the face of the earth—a seething human sea fed by streams, streamlets, and rills of immigration flowing from all the Yiddish-speaking centers of Europe.”
One Polish immigrant wrote in a letter home, “Here no one goes to b ed on an empty stomach because one Pole will save another, if he can.”

LIVING CONDITIONS

CITY TENEMENT BUILDINGS (“DUMBBELL TENEMENT”)

Most cities were ill-equipped to handle the material needs of their increasing populations. City Streets were often flooded with waste due to inadequate sewage systems. Decent housing was scarce, and some immigrants lived in alleyway shanties made of scrap wood. Most urban-dwelling immigrants lived in tenement buildings—run down, low rent apartment buildings clustered together in the poorest parts of town. Tenements typically had six or seven floors, each of which usually contained four four-room apartments. The buildings’ first floors usually housed one or two shops with attached living quarters, in which the shopkeepers and their families lived. On the remaining floors, large families—often paying boarders—crammed in notoriously overcrowded apartments, which typically cost $10 to $20 a month to rent. One New York City social worker counted 1,231 people living in just 120 rooms in one part of the city.

An Italian immigrant living in Boston recalled, “I lived in a three room apartment…with fourteen people. At night the floor of the kitchen and dining room were turned into beds.”
A journalist investigating the Little Italy section of New York reported, “In a room not thirteen feet either way slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the rest on the floor….Most men were lodgers, who slept there for five cents a spot.”
Notice the picture, it goes by the name “five cents a spot.” Many of these pictures are by Jacob Riis, an immigrant himself and reporter/photographer, and appear in his book “How the Other Half Lives.”
THE PERILS OF TENEMENT LIVING

Most tenement apartments were filthy, run down, and had little ventilation, light, or conveniences. One social worker could not locate a single bathtub in more than three city blocks of tenement buildings. Fires, disease, and death were common among immigrant tenement communities. One half of Manhattan’s fires occurred in tenement buildings, which made up only one third of the borough’s buildings. One historian noted that 40 percent of New York’s immigrants were stricken with the contagious lung disease, tuberculosis, and 60 percent of immigrant babies died before their first birthdays.

A Lithuanian immigrant described her family’s apartment in New York City as “Two rooms. The bedroom had no windows. The toilets were in the yard. Just a coal stove for heat.”
A visitor to a tenement building wrote, “To be in it…is to inhale the stenches of the neglected street…had a foul fiend designed these great barricades they could not have been more villainously arranged to avoid any change of ventilation.”

WORKING CONDITIONS

IMMIGRANT WORKFORCE

The majority of immigrants worked in industrial jobs, for a variety of reasons. First, most American industries were rapidly growing and in continual need of workers. First, most American industries were rapidly growing and in continual need of workers. Industrial employers found in the new immigrants a plentiful and cheap source of labor. Most immigrants were desperate for work and willing to accept almost any kind of job, no matter how unattractive or low paying. Second, a substantial number of immigrants—particularly southern Italians, Slavs, and Greeks—had been farm laborers in Europe. They had no desire to resume agricultural work, which in their homelands had been back breaking, low paying, and low status. Instead, they sought better-paying industrial jobs. Finally, with the exception of Jewish immigrants, a majority of immigrants—about 80 percent—were either unskilled or semiskilled laborers.

In 1901, the Industrial Commission pointedly remarked, “The fact that machinery and the division of labor opens a place for the unskilled immigrants makes it possible not only to get the advantages of machinery, but also to get the advantages of cheap labor.”
WORKING CONDITIONS

Immigrants were particularly vulnerable to worker exploitation, and many labored under intolerable conditions. For instance, few employers paid immigrants a living wage. Families typically needed about $16 a week to achieve a minimum standard of living, but most immigrants brought home far less. New England textile workers typically made $4 a week, and some garment workers made only $1.25 a week. The average worker’s salary was about 10 cents an hour, and child workers often made half that. Many immigrant children needed to work to help support their poverty-stricken families, and industrialists frequently exploited them for their cheap labor. In addition, many employers demanded that their employees work from 12 to 16 hours per day. One statistic revealed that women garment workers typically worked a 108 hour week. Working conditions in industrial occupations were often dangerous, unsanitary, and uncomfortable. Most factories had poor ventilation, and employees often breathed in dangerous chemical fumes, smoke, and airborne fibers.

A law officer reported that a Greek boy’s employer “made him work from half-past six in the morning until eleven at night, took away his tips, half starved him, and refused to pay even his meager wages of 35 cents per day until the end of the year.”

TREATMENT OF IMMIGRANTS

AMERICAN NATIVISM

Many native-born Americans and assimilated immigrants viewed the new immigrants with a combination of fear, hostility, and suspicion. American nativism was based on the belief that immigrants posed a threat to native-born Americans and their way of life. Nativists often held deep-seated prejudices about immigrants based on their ethnicity, race, religious background, and political and social beliefs. Many Americans of northern and western European stock considered the southern and eastern Europeans a different and inferior race. In addition, many American workers accused immigrants of taking jobs away from “real” Americans. Nativists worked to restrict the number of immigrants entering the United States in several ways. First came the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, placing a ban on all new immigrants from China. Another law in 1885 prohibited contract labor in order to protect American workers. Soon after the opening of Ellis Island as an immigration center in 1892, the new arrivals had to pass more rigorous medical and document examinations and pay an entry tax before being allowed to enter. The door for southern and eastern Europeans would close in the 1920s, when Quota Acts would be passed by Congress.

A Greek immigrant recalled, “If you were Greek or Italian you were considered low class, very low class.”
A newspaper editorial declared, “The immigrants are an invasion of venomous reptiles...long haired, wild eyed, bad smelling, atheistic, reckless foreign wretches, who never did a day’s work in their lives.”
A founder of the Immigration Restriction League referred to Americans with “British, German, and Scandinavian stock” as “free, energetic, and progressive.” In contrast, he declared Slavic, Mediterranean, and Jewish Europeans as “historically down-trodden, atavistic [inbred], and stagnant.”
A labor union president declared, “[The immigrants] are invading the land of Americans, and whether [the Americans] know it or not, are helping to take the bread out of their mouths.”